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Hell yeah! And it would be even better if the distro installers automatically enabled/disabled that repository and installed relevant packages (marked as recommended by related standard packages) according to chosen locale so that users outside the reach of existing patent totalities could get complete multimedia support right out of the box.

Indeed, that would be nice. Why most of the world has to suffer consequences of some law in
certain country?

I am not involved in mesa development, so I won't do what I am going to propose, but here is my simple question to everyone involved in mesa or whoever has the time:Did anyone even try to ask the patent-guys from S3 if it's ok to implement their technology in mesa??
Maybe we finally get an answer and if so, it is either of

"yeah, no problem, as mesa is a free project" (so mesa can use it directly)

"we had a patent on this? uh, we don't care" (so mesa can use it directly)

"yes, but noncommercial only" (so mesa can use it directly, maybe via configure-switch)

"absolutely not, we sue you instantly and kill your families!1!!" (so licensed users can use it via libdxtn)

Stop thinking+discussing too much and just ASK them!

First ask S3 (or whoever has the patent now). And in the worst case, here is another scenario: look at Blender; people bought it and opensourced it. Just a thought.

btw: Companies gather patents just to protect themselves from other companies with patents:
Corp. A: "Hey B, you released some product and we patented technology X you use!1!!"
Corp. B: "Well, but you use technology Y and we patented this"
Corp. A: "hm, oh well... so we're even, carry on, we were only kidding"
Look at early Microsoft/Sun/whatever... they simply used to be techies and did not care about patents. All this patent trolling occurred later.
If you'd ask S3, we knew if they are like Evil Corp A or not.